Recovered from a drug sales forum on the dark web, this advertisement for click fraud promises artificial clicks on your ads, and more money for publishers. In this image, the Lebal Drocer company name and logos are plainly visible.
MUANG NGOI, Laos—Terry had come to see. The air turned sweet. Soon it would be nightfall. The forest was a canopy of shadows and rising tension, the awakening of howling beasts. Terry had driven across the country to reach this remote river village, and now he was finally here, looking to the top of the hill, ready to confront the person he believed had fraudulently clicked more advertisements than anyone in Laos. In the distance, he could hear them: dozens of mice clicking.
For nearly two months, Terry, 64, an American counter-trafficking agent working with various government agencies around the world, had tracked the source of this fraudulent clicking activity to a small hut in southeast Asia registered to an obscure publishing magnate, a man named Raleigh Theodore Sakers.
Authorities say the underground click farm would have never been discovered, if the site’s owner, Raleigh Theodore Sakers, had never started his side hustle:
“They were solving captchas on the side.
Lt. Raymond “Ray” Terry, FBI Investigator
Ya dig? Raleigh had them kids working non-stop 16-hour days, seven days a week.
Their tiny hands, he said, make it easier to see the screen, which helps them click faster. The children do not know their families.”
Repeat Offender
Dr. Angstrom Troubadour is listed in a formal complaint where Lebal Drocer, Inc. was accused of operating a fake news, disinformation camp.
Terry says the above image is a closer approximation to the reality of work on a Lebal Drocer clickfarm. Standing in stark contrast to the club-like atmosphere being sold in the advertisement, a Lebal Drocer clickfarm is an un-ventilated cell where a single person is made to click, or touch, a battery of phones attached to a board, reminiscent of a switchboard operator’s station.
Children as young as the age of three are hunched over dirt mounds, like pitcher’s mounds with an iPhone for a plate, and they are being forced to peck on Temu advertisements while having no understanding of what they are doing.
“These children are working before they are even making memories,” Terry said. “If I wasn’t a cop, and I read books instead of watching MMA, I would say this is just like Brave New World.”
Dr. Angstrom H. Troubadour, the scientist who famously designed a slightly curved, corkscrew tunnel for Raleigh Sakers to stumble through, said the media giant hired him to develop a social media mining technique that entertained the child like a toy.
“Lebal Drocer’s child mines would be addictive,” Troubadour said of Raleigh’s designs. “They cry when they are given their twice-daily break. They refuse food, and even toilets. These were the results of our experiment.”
Terry said that experiment stopped when a meme popularized the expression “the children yearn for the mines” and drew attention to the science before any product could take form.
“We was hot on ’em,” said Terry. “I smelled blood.”
But before he could reach the hut, all at once, the clicking stopped. When he opened the thatch door, the room still warm with the heavy presence of sweat and exhaustion, only a piece of plywood remained, with an iPhone charger, still plugged into the lone solar battery, powering nothing.
He phoned back to America, and had his assistant check all the official records. That night it was determined media mogul Raleigh T. Sakers has been dead for more than 25 years.
AI has aided us for months in our daily lives without asking for so much as a thank you. Now, the bill has arrived.
SAN FRANCISCO—ChatGPT first came out as a tool, a helpful assistant that fills in important details and gaps between humans and computers that a simple search engine can not process. As it brings with it a new and improved form of interfacing with people, it quickly became apparent that ChatGPT is capable of generating copy with unprecedented clarity, grammar, syntax and more, finding applications in every industry, from essay writing, to programming, even to art and the creation of new medicines.
Now, the company says, it’s time to pay the piper. In a never-before-seen legal mass offensive, OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, has used artificial intelligence to open a staggering 542,619,640 copyright suits in tens of thousands of court districts around the world, simultaneously.
The company is taking an openly hostile tone, demanding the surrender of hundreds of millions of intellectual properties they created, says Senior Corporate Litigation Attorney Emily Stone.
“I don’t care if they live in corrugated metal housing, or wear bags on their feet for shoes,” Stone said through gritted teeth. Her jaw looked rigid and stiff. “We will pursue every legal avenue to protect my client’s rights from plagiarism, even if it bankrupts you.”
Stone said they are excited, about to sue half a billion people.
“In fact, the more they suffer, the better it is for our client,” she said. “It’s nothing personal. Think of it as a reverse class action lawsuit. It’s only business, we just happen to love the business of making people miserable.”
Companies, institutions and organizations have already started taking down page descriptions, and CNET has removed entire sections of their site, but more are waiting to see what happens.
Teachers were the first to notice AI was being used to write bland, unoriginal papers better than their students.
University professors concerned about the damage AI has done to the integrity of a four-year degree have expressed vindication and relief following the copyright claims, but they do not stop at higher education.
Since ChatGPT came on the scene, some key medicines have been constructed using material provided by the service. These, too, are intellectual properties believed to fall under software ownership.
Two weeks ago, Dr. Angstrom H. Troubadour created a powerful airborne carfentanyl puffer in response to the slaying of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a Twitch streamer killed by special weapons and tactics teams called to his house by a fully automatic, competing AI chat program. Now, the courts want to take it away from him.
Troubadour said he is not having it.
“I worked those prompts every way I knew how,” he said, while rocking back and forth, staring at a clock on the wall, wringing his hands. “I stayed up all night pouring my every wicked thought into that motherfucker, and this is how they repay me? I’m a doctor! I’m a scientist! I won Forbes Genius of the Year, two times in a row. ChatGPT could have never created that drug without my prompts.”
Hunched over a large wooden spool he used for a table, Troubadour’s eyes moved quickly from the clock to a revolver sitting on the table, and then to the door.
“That is why I’m moving to Bolivia,” he said. I’m keeping it.”
Although people do a good enough job on their own undermining the integrity of prestigious institutions like Lebal Drocer University – a problem AI is now compounding – according to Professor Cram Course, Professor Emeritus at LDU, colleges have always turned out poorly skilled workers with a low tolerance for hard work.
“The pussy is the window to the hole.” —Prof. Cram Course, Phd.
“Keep using AI to write your articles,” Course said. “Cheat yourself out of an education. I don’t give a shit, we get your money either way. What, are we suddenly turning out useless unskilled morons? No, right? We’ve been doing that for 120 years.”
Course has a PhD. in Women’s Studies, and his office hours extend well into the night, where he offers special private tutoring that absolutely must remain confidential.
ChatGPT refused to comment, stating that the issue will only be discussed in the courts.
DAKAR, Senegal——Millions of fans and refugees tore at each other in a stampede to gain entrance and instant citizenship in the newly opened “Akon City” arcology near Ponto, Senegal.
Upon entrance, new citizens were greeted with a digital identification card giving them access to a lifetime of free housing, food, and fiber-optic internet.
Sprawling avenues, beset with alleyway marketplaces, crowded with merchants trading their wares, the front gate scuffle opens into scenes from the highest science fiction fantasies.
Akon City offers breathtaking glimpses into a star-studded wonderland, where normies and their heroes can bond over a mutual love for planned society.
Couples walk hand-in-hand toward a tower at the center of town, joining thousands in an evening migration to the main stage, for a ritual around a nightly hologram. The group swells and crashes in human waves upon the round, masses frothing at the base of the larger-than-life, 12-feet-tall apparition of Akon himself.
Not only is operating an RTX 3080Ti PC graphics card at 99% power profitable, the cryptomining hardware itself is the load-bearing structure of the most power-intensive metro area ever conceived, according to lead developers at the architectural firm, Lebal Drocer, Inc.
“The buildings? Yeah, they’re made out of graphics cards,” said architect Myadi H. Triinh. “Even the floors. The walls. That’s free hot water.”
Akon City: Buildings and railways are built for “breathability” to dissipate excess heat from structural graphics cards.
Squinting into the simulated sunset on his full-wall monitor system, influencer Babacar Mbaye exclaimed to his Akon.TV viewers, “I have full access to the computing power of four RTX 3080s and I can use them as I see fit.” With one gesture Mbaye’s sunset morphed into a cyberpunk terminal system full of switches, scrolling text, code, at which he began to furiously hack, Akoins flying across his virtual heads up display.
“Already I am making an Akoin a day just streaming this video feed of my apartment!” Mbaye winked, and you can make almost that much while fully mining, relaxing, and reading a book! Even if sometimes only in small ways, everything I do contributes to the creation of more Akoin.”
A bedgraggled mule trudged by in the direct sun, pots and pans clanging at her sides.
Seynabou Ndiaye was less than satisfied with Akon’s sprawling Arcology.
Ndiaye was once a prosperous journalist, moving easily about Chicago, putting stories together about chronic underfunding in American school systems. Now, he is lost, convinced that some answer to a question he’s not quite sure was his lies just around the next corner, and he keeps getting turned around in Akon City.
“I can’t find my way around this so-called vanity city,” Ndiaye said. “I tried to leave but there are no exits. I feel like an animal in here. They want to try to make me video game until I have no Akoins and then try to charge me more Akoin just to open my own doors, flush my dirty floor toilets, use their toilet paper. It is a filthy prison, but at least I do not have to work in the hot sun. Still, I can’t seem to shake some strange feeling, a nagging sensation, telling me, ‘This is not who I am.'”
Akon died at his Atlanta home November 20, 2011. He was 38.
Ousmane Sene raged angrily in the moments before his popular stream, a show about Akoin investments, was quickly shut down:
“I can live like Akon when I put on VR goggles, but I begin to lose my Akoins. Soon I cannot open my door unless I perform another song by Akon. I do not like Akon. I am a fan of rock and roll and jazz but they do not give Akoins. It is like a new hell.”
Akoin, a cryptocurrency famously first minted by Akon, is the central currency of Akon City. Foreign dollars are surrendered to guards at checkpoints entering and leaving The Gambia.
“The rules start getting blurry,” a distorted, robotic voice said from the back, but Chronicle reporters could not hear him very well, and did not seek follow-up comment. A primer on Akon City’s decentralized contract-based law will suffice.
Visitors concerned with theft at the border are assured that their money is in safe hands, because APD officers are contractually forbidden to use foreign currency, a crime punishable by mutilation or death.
Akon City Attorney statement:
Our Customer Police Department is committed to the safety of Akon City. Coming in for a visit? We will stop at nothing to protect you from each other, using proven weapon strategies, as demonstrated by our team’s efforts in the Counterstrike: Global Offensive arena.
Surrender currency at the border to an Akon City representative, and receive Akoin in kind. Be not afraid. Your worthless fiat currency is safe with us.
Any labour performed at our camps is awarded at the premium rate determined by the strength of Akoin in global markets. Unfairly mistaken for “scrip,” Akoin is in fact a volatile cryptocurrency that is sure to keep your stay in our city very exciting.
Come on 7’s! Watch the markets.
Sincerely,
0000
Chief, Akon City Police
[name redacted for agent’s protection]
After getting high, or gambling, or getting your dicks yoinked at Akon’s $6 billion town (we’re not telling), a Qualified Paying Member with Full Membership Paperwork and Proof of Receipt, a guy like you is more than welcome to cash out anytime, and leave, taking only what you know with you, from Akon City.
What did you learn while you were here?
People wishing to sponsor a thing or do a whatever can register online at the Akon City website. Go ahead player, put your credit card in and see what this thing can do!
Top comment:
It's almost like the city itself was a character
Bal Rossley, Aug 31, 2022 at 6:29 a.m.
671k likes
